A Scientifical Explanation
by Moka-girl
Summary: Late one night, a mysterious young man opens a file titled 'X-men, a scientifical explanation' and begins to read about what science has to say when it comes to these superheroes. Features Cyclops, then Pyro, Angel, Wolverine, Colossus, Storm and more to come, in short and succinct explanations.
1. Scott Summers - Cyclops

**_Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me. Everything belongs to their respective authors._**

_A young man was sitting alone, in an office. In front of him was a desk, and on it, several thin files, stacked neatly in piles, next to comics with 'X-men' written on them, and colourful characters on the front cover. Sighing tiredly, he opened the first file, and began to read._

**CYCLOPS**

« The story of Cyclops is a sad one. He was orphaned at a young age, and his powers started appearing, starting with terrible headaches. Luckily, he was given eye lenses made out of ruby to help him deal. Ever since, he can shoot lasers out of his eyes with remarkable ease.

The funny thing is, ruby crystal was what was employed by a certain Theodore Harold Maiman, an American physicist, in 1960. It's by firing at it with ultraviolet rays, the "pumping", that the famous ray was achieved. From where does Cyclops get the necessary energy?

A possible theory is that he hosts an important amount of bioluminescent bacteria like the skin of certain fish that live down at very deep levels, but much more virulent. He would need what amounts to twenty to thirty tanning lamps (that use UVs) in each eye if he wants the rays he emits to be as powerful as a welding laser, used to join multiple pieces of metal together.

**Hypothesis:** His eyes host symbiotic bacteria. With all that fauna in his eyes, it could certainly explain the headaches!

**Symbiosis:** The bacteria, here, isn't a parasite, because it doesn't penetrate your body, and live there without giving anything back. The symbiotic bacteria can help you digestion, for example. It's an equivalent exchange, and that distinguishes it from a parasite.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, this is what a laser is:

A device that utilizes the natural oscillations of atoms or molecules between energy levels for generating a beam of coherent electromagnetic radiation usually in the ultraviolet, visible, or infrared regions of the spectrum.

**Laser recipe:**

The energy of an atom can depend on certain values, authorized 'energy levels'. For the laser, we use a solid like the ruby or a gas like the helium-neon mix, whose atoms possess three energy levels:

Stable, instable and metastable.

a) If we leave it alone, an atom is stable. But if it receives a photon (a 'grain' of light) whose energy is equal to what the atom needs to change its state…

b) …it will absorb the photon and become instable. A fraction on a second later, it gets rid of a part of the energy acquired under the form of a photon…

c) It then becomes metastable. That lasts a few seconds…

d) And, hop, it lets go of yet another photon, a new one. And now it's stable again. The energy of two freed photons is equal to the energy of the acquired photon.

To obtain a laser ray, the atoms first have to be brought to the instable state: that's the "pumping", mentioned earlier. How? A flash of UVs, for example.

In complete disorder, the atoms climb the fall back down while getting rid of their photons. But after a long enough pumping, millions of atoms laze about for a few seconds in the metastable state.

But, one must know one of the small secrets of matter: when an excited atom receives another photon, it copies it and spits out a second photon identical to the first. This is stimulated emission. The result: an atom becomes stable again by spitting out a photon that will go meet another excited atom and provoke the stimulated emission of a second identical photon… and so on.

And then we get a whole lot of photons, all identical. That's the laser. »

-x-x-x-

_I'm hesitating when it comes to the next character I'll cover. Would you prefer Angel, Pyro, Wolverine or Colossus? I'm keeping Storm and Magneto for last, so they are unavailable. Send a review with your choice._


	2. John Allerdyce - Pyro

**_Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me. Everything belongs to their respective authors._**

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**Pyro**

« As soon as they use their super-powers, the x-men and all the other kinds of superheroes spend huge amounts of energy: that's their biggest problem. For example, how much energy does John Allerdyce, a.k.a 'Pyro', need in order to make a small fireball with his power to control that element? It can put a hole through a reinforced door, as in, melt a small iron cube with side 10 cm long (nearly 8 kilos).

That represents about 7'5000 kilojoules, if you suppose that all the energy he uses goes to make the fireball, and none is wasted, and that all the energy of the ball goes into destroying the reinforced door (the energy efficiency is perfect).

He needs to gather all that energy in, let's say, one second, which means a strength of 7'500 kW! Ten times that of the motor of a Formula 1, and thousands times more than our international sportsmen! But the worst is that after that, Pyro should go to bed immediately, because 7'500kJ is the energy that someone with his body-build needs to last one whole day!

**Hypothesis:** When he has to fight, Pyro eats about thirty big meals to possess the necessary energy. I wonder when he has the time to go fight the bad guys…

**Joule (J):** It's a way to measure energy. It's how much energy a mass of 1kg creates when it touches the ground after having been thrown 10 centimeters higher.

**Watt (W):** it's to measure power, the debit, the _flow_ of energy. One watt is one Joule used per second. One kilowatt (kW) is simpler 1'000 times that.»

_The man chuckled when he read that last bit, genuinely amused. It did make some sort of sense that John Allerdyce would need a lot of energy. An amusing image of him stuffing his face like a pig came to mind._

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_-x-x-x-_

_The possibilities for the next chapter are: Colossus, Wolverine, Angel, Jean Grey, or Charles Xavier. As I said, Storm and Magneto are for last._

_I would like to thank BettyCrocker540, CaribbeanTrinidadian, hannibal1996 and shadowoftheblackdeat for their reviews. They were kind enough to comment, and I appreciate that._


	3. Warren Worthington - Angel

**Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me. Everything belongs to their respective authors.**

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**ANGEL**

« Using wings to fly is very tiring. And for Warren Worthington III, this is no exception. Especially when you have bird wings on your back, that aren't connected to the pectoral muscles. On birds, these powerful chest muscles can represent up to a quarter of the bird's weight. The smallest birds, hummingbirds, have to flap their 80 to 200 times per second to battle gravity and fly, and because of that they use up the equivalent of half their weight in sugar every day. The problem is even worse for those that weigh more, because the power needed to fly is proportional to the weight that needs to be carried around. To burn all those calories, oxygen is brought to the muscles by a complex circulatory system and a heart built for such effort, like with mammals.

But that's not all: In order to not die from heat during such effort (because when a human works out, their body heats up. If we worked as much as a bird, our body would get so hot that we'd die), a bird's lungs are connected to small bags of air that helps get rid of the heat, and makes them weigh less. Their lightness is impressive: they have empty bones (unlike us), evolution made their teeth disappear so their head weighs less, and that goes for some internal organs (females have only one ovary, for example). Biologists have already done a theoretical calculation: if we did all these efforts as well to become lighter, we could fly… but we'd have to weigh less than 17 kilos, and have our wings connected to our pectoral muscles, not our back, where we'd barely have the strength to flap those long and heavy wings.

The champion bird that can fly while weighing a lot is the swan, who weighs 10 kg. The biggest bird capable of flight is _Arteodis_ _kori_, a bird from Africa that weighs between 15 and 20 kg… and stays on the ground most of the time.

**Hypothesis:** Angel possesses the heart and lungs of a bird via xenotransplant. He has a draconian diet akin to an anorexic, is 1m25 tall, wears a polystyrene denture, and has empty bones. But if that were the case, he'd need to be very careful not to break anything!

**Xenotransplant:** transplant using parts from one species to administer to another. Like using tissue from a pig's heart to repair a human's own heart. »

_Amused, the man reading the file thought that, basing himself on the fights Angel had been through, it wasn't likely that he had hollow bones, or he'd be dead._

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-x-x-x-

_In the reviews, I had someone asking for Wolverine, and someone else for Angel. I decided it would be Angel because his explanation is shorter, and easier to put in simple words. Who d'you want me to do next? See who interests you and tell me via review._

_Wolverine, Colossus, Jean Grey, Charles Xavier…_

_As I said, Storm and Magneto are for last, because I forgot the explanation for them at my dad's, and I' only going to see him next in two weeks._

_It was difficult to write this one, because it's so impossible for Angel to fly. What we call wings on birds are actually what would correspond to arms on us, and it doesn't make any sense to add extra limbs on the back. It could potentially break a person's spine if they had wings like Angel's and tried to fly. So if any one is getting wings anytime soon, they should have feathers growing on their arms, and those limbs lengthening a great deal._


	4. James Howlett - Wolverine

******_Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me. Everything belongs to their respective authors._**

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**WOLVERINE**

« This amnesiac mutant is capable of instant regeneration, and is unable to grow old (apparently, he was born in the 19th century). His first employers had him undergo a painful operation and gifted him with an adamantium skeleton. That's what his flick knife claws are made of, the ones that retract into his body when he has finished fighting. But what is the secret of this mutant, able to heal so fast? Probably the reparation factor of his cells, and particularly his stem cells. But cellular multiplication costs a lot of energy. To create 4 kilos of the baby you were at your birth, all that from one tiny zygote, your mother used up 350 million Joules . That enough to send a 10 kg satellite in low Earth orbit. And to think, it took her 9 months. To repair his 100 kg of muscles, Wolverine probably does a lot of grocery shopping to get his nutriments!

**Hypothesis:** Wolverine possesses the stem cells of an embryo. Hmmm, he really looks old for that!

**Stem cells:** When you were but an embryo, before the fourth day of existence, the few cells you were composed of knew how to divide themselves to give you everything you needed: osseous cells, muscle fibers, neurons… These embryonic stem cells were called totipotent – which means they could do EVERYTHING. In an adult organism – but it's true when it comes to teenagers, too – there are still stem cells left, hidden amongst the other cells and ready to supply the body with what it needs, like bone marrow or red globules, or anything else. But most of the time, adult stem cells have lost their power. They specialized themselves in one domain, instead of doing everything. »

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-x-x-x-

_Wolverine is a baby!_

_No, not really. But the idea is amusing._


	5. Piotr Nikolaïevitch Rasputine - Colossus

**_Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me. Everything belongs to their respective authors._**

_The young man, getting increasingly amused by these files, turned to the next one._

_._

**COLOSSUS**

« Heroes that get bigger, or multiply, have one itty bitty problem: they violate the law of the conservation of mass.

Piotr Rasputine's carbon polymer flesh gives him superhuman strength and the ability to become a living being made of steel.

What?

Yeah, no idea how that works.

Still, we can be led to think that, in his skin and his muscles, carbon atoms are replaced by iron ones. However, that would mean 110 kg when he's normal, and 190 kg when he's transformed, which means 80 kg made out of nothing.

It is said that Piotr can do it thanks to a charge of 'bio-energy'. With the E = mc2 equation affirming that, theoretically, we can create matter from energy, it is maybe possible… if he disposed of two million times the amount of electricity produced throughout the world every year.

**Hypothesis:** Colossus pays a lot of electricity bills. He must either be loaded, or he has several nuclear power plants. »

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-x-x-x-

_I was thinking of doing Storm next… Anybody for it?_


	6. Ororo Munroe - Storm

**********_Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me. Everything belongs to their _**_respective_**_ authors._**

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**STORM**

« The beautiful Ororo Munroe is capable of influencing the weather. That is an impressive gift, when you consider the fact that a mature hurricane emits, every second, just as much energy as five atomic bombs. But how does she do it? Above tropical seas, she probably uses the natural evaporation of the sea water as a fuel (see underneath, the explanation on how hurricanes work).

But on dry land? The birth of tornadoes, in the US, requires a lot of heat. Storm would then be able to overheat the air of hundreds, or even thousands of m3. Her biggest problem then, would be to calculate and plan the effects of her weather manipulations. Because, as scientists would tell you, the gaseous layer enveloping the Earth is a delicate and sensitive machine: the smallest uncertainty on its state today could stop us from foreseeing an important event tomorrow. Like, for example, the storm that devastated France in 1999. Our Ororo Munroe could very well lose control of her own creations.

**Hypothesis**: She stores the heat from the sun, and uses it to control the weather. Also, in her head is a super-calculator capable of foreseeing the evolution of the weather.

Difference between a cyclone and a hurricane: A hurricane is a cyclone whose winds go faster than 177 km/h. A tornado is only about ten to twenty minutes long, and happens on solid ground.

**How does a hurricane appear?**

The cyclones form when the hot air near the sea, that weighs less, attempts to take the place of the cold air, higher up, that weighs more. The hot air has appeared when the sea water evaporated, and will try to go upwards, because it weighs less than the colder air, already up there before the hot air appeared. However, how will these two enormous air masses swap places?

The situation is like this: There is the water underneath, then, in the middle, a layer of hot air attempting to go up, and then, higher up, a layer of cold air already there.

The starting point will be when a storm, or a thunderstorm, creates a 'hole', meaning, a place where the pressure of the cold air will decrease. The hot air will be sucked into that hole, and go up. It will then start swirling, like when water circles down into a drain. The resulting hurricane will only stop once the temperature between the air layers has equalized. That takes time, because when the air goes up, it loses the humidity it possesses and thus heats up even more. Why? It's the opposite of perspiration: when the liquid water on your skin evaporates, you feel refreshed, cooler. In this case, when the water in the air turns to liquid water, it creates heat. »


End file.
